Pat Maddix of Rockford, IL asks “My company likes to introduce projects with aggressively short schedules. What are your thoughts on this?”"

Curt Finch, Journyx CEO, responds:

Every project can be defined by three parameters: scope, content and schedule.

Consider as an example a team meeting:

The scope of a meeting is the stated purpose of that meeting. Regardless of whether the meeting is undertaken to develop a new marketing strategy, outline a product roadmap, or review sales forecasts mid-quarter, that reason for meeting is the scope.

The content of a meeting is the data and ideas presented, as well as who is doing the presenting and how. The quality of the content, and how prepared in advance it is, are often key factors as well.

The meetings schedule is simply the time allotted – its length.

Controlling meeting length (schedule) is easy. You simply state that the meeting will last for 1 hour. But without a good meeting definition (scope) and prepared ideas and slides and handouts and data (content), the meeting may prove to be a waste of time at only 1 hour.

The schedule of the meeting – its duration – should be influenced by its scope and content. If the meeting truly should require two hours, then schedule it appropriately. To do otherwise is to waste one hour instead of getting value out of two.

The same concepts flow outward to other projects. Schedule them to match their scope and content and they will be successful. Disregard those key factors and you’re more than likely going to end up failing.

Got a question for Curt? Drop us a line at askcurt@journyx.com and we’ll see if we can’t get him to sit down for a minute or two, peer into his crystal ball, and give you his best take on things.

Sven T. of Los Angeles asks: “We’re implementing a new vacation policy in 2009. What advice do you have for making the roll-out successful?”

Curt Finch, Journyx CEO, responds:

For organizations in the United States the following recommendations make sense.

If your company is under 50 employees, FMLA (the family medical leave act) is less regulated and the best advice I have seen is that you should coalesce all paid time off (PTO) into one plan so that when people take a day off it doesn’t matter whether it is a vacation day or a sick day. This gets you out of the business of asking people to bring in a Doctor’s note. Who really wants the fun job of enforcing that rule?

If you are in a company with more than 50 employees, it is advisable to keep FMLA time off in a separate bucket. These days can only be taken in certain circumstances and this must be documented and kept track of even if it is unpaid time off.

It is likely that new federal regulations may be coming our way that push the FMLA requirements down on smaller and smaller organizations.

If all of your employees work in states where it is legally allowable to do so, you may want to create a PTO plan that grants and approves leave only when requested, as opposed to one where the PTO is accrued as an asset that is owned by the employee.  This way employees that quit or are terminated for any reason do not get to take their vacation as a cash ‘quitting bonus’ when they leave unless you authorize it. This allows you to distribute more generous PTO allowances to the employees that remain with the company.

It is difficult to find a list of all the states that are ‘employer-friendly’ in this way but here is one person’s shot at it: http://en.allexperts.com/q/Employment-Law-924/2008/10/PTO-Pay.htm

Keep in mind that people need time off.  Some people need to be forced to take it.  No manager needs an employee to shave his head and run barking through the streets on all fours or show up to work with an M16.  Notably, European productivity often matches or exceeds that of U.S. employees despite the fact that they have much more time off.  Japanese per worker economic productivity rarely exceeds that of the U.S. despite many more hours worked per week on average.

I think the evidence would indicate that generous PTO policies for the people who stick with your company for the long haul actually pay the company back handsomely in the long run.

In the knowledge worker economy we now live in, every employee is ultimately a volunteer.  Even in a trying economy, your best people have options.

Got a question for Curt? Drop us a line at askcurt@journyx.com and we’ll see if we can’t get him to sit down for a minute or two, peer into his crystal ball, and give you his best take on things.

Claire S. of Atlanta, GA asks: How do you see technology impacting time tracking in the next five to ten years?

Curt Finch, Journyx CEO, responds:

I see a few things happening:

• As consumers’ experience with iPhone raises expectations for usability, time tracking applications’ user interfaces will become friendlier and more intuitive.
• Software-as-a-Service will become more and more dominant as IT people become more and more scarce and businesses become more accustomed to this model.
• Communications technologies like WSDL/XML and SOAP will enable more connectivity between web-based applications like Journyx and Salesforce.com
• Automated monitoring software will increase the ability of clients to edit a pre-filled timesheet at the end of the week instaed of trying to remember what they did all week.
• Project-oriented time collection capabilities will be enhanced by community * building tools like wikis and blogs.
• Businesses will start to see the advantage of viewing time management as a core business process, like inventory management is today.
• Single point-of-entry time collection systems that send different views of the same data to payroll, billing and project management applications will become even more valuable.

Got a question for Curt? Drop us a line at askcurt@journyx.com and we’ll see if we can’t get him to sit down for a minute or two, peer into his crystal ball, and give you his best take on things.

We kid our CEO a lot on our blog. But we do it out of love and respect. Curt really is a pretty smart guy and he’s chock full o’ knowledge about time tracking, project management and crazy technology things like the aforementioned Web2.0 and what the future holds for businesses in the 21st Century. So rather than horde his pearls of wisdom we’ve decided to share him with you, our loyal readers.

To that end, we’re opening up the phone lines (metaphorically) to let you ask Curt for his thoughts on whatever’s on your mind. So drop us a line at askcurt@journyx.com and we’ll pose your questions to the big guy. Then, starting next month, we’ll share Curt’s answers to the most compelling questions from our readers.